I Had No Idea I Could Be So Cruel
Beach Walkabout, 1978
I recently performed an edited version of this strange childhood episode at one of Martha Frankel’s Woodstock Bookfest storyslams. Please enjoy, and if you’ve not done so already, consider sharing and/or subscribing to Robert Burke Warren, Showfolk at whatever level works for you. Thanks so much.
I had no idea I could be so cruel.
At age thirteen, I am a responsible latchkey kid – a doer of dishes, maker of the family pancakes, glad to run barefoot to the corner store to buy you Coffee Mate and Minute Maid. A pleaser, and easy to please.
Moms tend to love me. Adam Cahoon’s single mom in particular. In the summer of 1978, Adam invites me to their Fort Myers, Florida beach bungalow. Hormones have kicked in. Adam and I, newly hairy and stinky, flirt with two girls. Like us, these girls will soon enter high school. We hoist them onto our newly-broadened shoulders to play chicken in the waves.
That night, I fall asleep with the memory of bristly thighs squeezing the sides of my head.
I awake the next morning before everyone. Clad only in cutoffs, I walk to the water and squint at the glittering Gulf of Mexico. For the first time, it’s just me and the sea. I sink my toes into the sand shifting beneath me. The undertow pulls at my ankles. My skin braces at the cold, then adjusts, warms. I step along the foamy edge, toward the distant pier.
My conscience says, “Go wake up Ms. Cahoon, tell her you’re taking a stroll.”
Waves pound the beach in a rhythm both predictable and unpredictable. Ocean current ensnares my blood. The voice of my conscience is no match for all of this. I walk on. And on. Way past the pier.
I’ll turn back soon, I say. Just not yet. Not yet.
The sun burns my face and chest. As morning turns to afternoon, it reddens my back. This will be one of the worst burns of my life.
I pass sunbathers, families. Girls and boys a little older than me, in bikinis and trunks, newly graceful in my teenager eyes. Like when the optometrist slips the proper lens into the viewfinder and presto – you acutely perceive what has been there all along.
I neither eat nor drink anything. Of my conscious thoughts I recall only a dim acceptance Ms. Cahoon is wracked with worry over me. Any other day, knowing I’m causing distress would evoke extreme anxiety, fear of punishment, of losing love. These worries would overwhelm. But not today. Today, concerns of consequences moan low in the distance, beyond the breakers, like a faraway foghorn, easy to ignore.
I am focused as I never have been. In the time to come, I will learn to harness this ability for good; I’ll willfully enter states of flow while remaining responsible to those who care about me. But that will require discipline I do not yet possess.
On this summer day in 1978, I move along the Fort Myers beach like a time-blind drunk, allowing my skin to burn so it will peel off by itself.
I return to the bungalow at dusk.
Ms. Cahoon is out of her mind, eyes bloodshot, face flushed. It will be years before I understand her mixture of rage and relief. Her WHERE WERE YOU and WHY WOULD YOU evoke a sudden, cold shame. But pulsing below is the dark pleasure of knowing my power, my value. With shaking hands, she dials a number. WE FOUND HIM, she says. WE FOUND HIM.
Trying to be cool, Adam repeatedly tells her I TOLD YOU. But I can see he, too, was worried. Ms. Cahoon asks me questions I can’t answer, mostly WHY. She is mystified. She thought she knew me.
I cannot explain. I am suddenly exhausted, verging on tears as the dominant aspects of my persona-in-progress reassert. I apologize profusely and sincerely, gulp down a pitcher of lemonade. Ms. Cahoon soon stops her inquest, and just silently rubs Noxema into my back.
Adam and I stay friends. His mother never once brings up this episode. They’ll even invite me back to Fort Myers the following year. By this time, I am a fledgling musician, a beginner bass player with big dreams. Adam and I will smoke weed with his older brother on a moonlit beach and we’ll all laugh ‘til we cry. I’ll make out with a lip-glossed stranger girl in a cinema during a screening of the laughable James Bond flick Moonraker.
As far as I know, in Ms. Cahoon’s eyes, my aberrant walkabout does not define me. I am forgiven. Some days I think part of me knew I would be, some deep emotional intelligence I still struggle to know and use and trust, to this day.
Thirty-three years later, my own kind, conscientious thirteen-year-old will climb onto the roof of a beach house, sun blazing down. While we sit in the shade of the porch below, he will follow a strange impulse to jump fifteen feet to the ground, right before our horrified eyes. Miraculously, my child is unhurt. I beg for an explanation: WHY would you do such an out-of-character thing? In return I get shrugs. Genuine bafflement.
Waves crash on the shifting sands in the distance, a rhythm both predictable and unpredictable. My conscience tells me to stop asking questions, pull back, expand that vista. This time, I listen to it, and obey.
None of us do. And yet.